Matthew Herbert: ‘I can make music out of a banana or David Cameron or Belgium’

The experimental producer believes music is a political weapon, sampling everything from the sound of bullets to pigs. His new album The Shakes goes back to his house roots, but this is a pop record packed with serious ideas

To say that politics plays on the mind of Matthew Herbert would be something of an understatement. When I arrive at his beachfront recording studio in Whitstable, Kent, he gives me a tour of his studio, pointing out that the mixing desk sits on a raised platform to safeguard it from global warming-related flooding. Next door is a venue that hosts wedding parties, which has had the unfortunate effect of forcing Herbert to view romance as he would any other industry: “Every couple ask for the same ‘individual touches’,” he notes. Earlier, Herbert had picked me and the Guardian’s photographer up from the station in his 1971 Mini van – the perfect vehicle in which to bemoan the way capitalism has conspired to diminish build quality in modern cars.

Nowhere does his relentlessly questioning brain work harder than on his inventive records. Under various guises, Herbert has made music out of everything from a pig’s life cycle (One Pig, for which he received death threats) to a day’s edition of the Guardian. He’s snuck into the Houses of Parliament to shake matchboxes next to John Major, and driven a tank over the site where Nigella Lawson once cooked a meal for Tony Blair and George Bush. On his studio wall is a framed apple pie tin, complete with bullet holes. “We shot that with Nazi weaponry, an SD officer’s 1939 Luger,” he notes. “Normally gunshot sounds are recorded from the position of the gun. This was recorded from the pie, so in terms of perspective that’s actually what it sounds like to be shot. Which means the natural audience who might recognise that sound will probably have been killed.”

His latest album, recorded under his Herbert moniker, is the (relatively) straight ahead The Shakes. A jazz-infused house record complete with sumptuous chord changes and the odd gently euphoric chorus, it proves that Herbert can still be an adept pop musician as well as an ideas man. Yet while he claims he found “joyful release” in just writing music for the sake of it, rather than under a strict conceptual framework, it’s still bristling with ideas under the surface.

“Having kids drives home to you what an idiotic system we’ve built,” he says. “For instance, at a kids’ party everyone gets a party favour with all these sweets full of chemicals that aren’t properly tested on human health and these cheap plastic toys that last a minute and a half and then go straight in the bin, and then for 5,000 years in the ground. You don’t want to be a dick and say no presents and make it hard for the parents and embarrass my own child … but at the same time I’m watching him eat food that has some of the same ingredients as breast implants! The chicken lived a miserable life, nobody got paid properly, it’s exploitative and poisonous … and yet it’s someone’s birthday party, it should be fun and happy.” He smiles, realising he’s off on a rant again: “And I should just fucking relax.”

Herbert has always been political. The son of “eccentric” parents, he was a Greenpeace organiser at school and got a hard time for not having a television or “a pair of long trousers until I was 12”. When he was 10, his grandfather gave him a fifth edition copy of The Communist Manifesto, and he nods towards his grandfather’s influence by playing his piano on one of The Shakes’s standout tracks, Smart.

Yet it wasn’t until university in the early 90s, while swept up in the free party scene, that Herbert became properly politicised.

“It felt like the only real time where I had participated in a truly classless act,” he says. “You had very rich farmers and their kids letting us have a couple of fields to do a party full of football hooligans, students, crusties and travellers.”

Watching this freedom blip get gobbled up by capitalism – and depoliticised and sanitised in the process – was a depressing affair for Herbert. Why does he think all the energy that goes into things like the free party fails to get translated into more strident political acts?

“I think because there’s risk involved. You might kill the party, or people might disagree. But we’ve got to start taking risks if we’re going to change the world for the better and slow down climate change or deal with corrupt financial systems.” He quotes Naomi Klein, who said the only thing we need to do to destroy ourselves is to carry on the way we are: “It’s very hard to not see music as part of the status quo,” he says.

The more you talk to Herbert, the more you realise that he views music as a complete metaphor for the way we’re living. It’s not just that he thinks music can be more than entertainment – he thinks seeing music as mere entertainment can be inherently dangerous.

He points out that music soundtracks the majority of our lives, from getting on planes to eating in canteens, and questions what its true purpose is: “The majority of the messages we’re getting [from music] are: ‘Hey, everything’s cool, everything’s safe, don’t worry’. It starts to feel politically really uncomfortable. Has music just become this big security blanket? Has it been absorbed into the current economic system to the point where it’s just happy to tell us constantly that everything’s all right? A decorative wallpaper for this destructive, hideous bubble that we live in these days?”

Increasingly, Herbert has been trying to use music to fight the system. He’s done so directly, with The End of Silence – a record made out of a five-second sample of a pro-Gaddafi plane dropping a bomb over Libya that killed three people – and the lyrics to songs on the new album such as Strong, which addresses inequality directly: “You might have the yacht but we still have the water.”

But he’s also done it with a dizzying palette of sounds – making music for political purposes out of everything from the World Trade Centre attacks to the top 10 selling items in Tesco. How does he expect the average listener to pick such sounds up?

“I don’t like the idea of an average listener,” he replies. “You and I might not know what bullets sound like but there are plenty of people who do. There are people out there who know what a protest march sounds like. We’re so used to being handed things on a plate, whereas I’m interested in the journey one might make to find out what those sounds are. I don’t expect everyone to get every nuance of every sound – it’s about layers and layers and layers of meaning.

“Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It has a title, you read about it, you see the artwork. If I named a song about, say, the price of milk, someone would have to talk about the appalling price that farmers get for milk from supermarkets. That’s incredible power you’ve got.”

When talking of artistic power, Herbert likes to mention the sampler, which has opened up a world of sound to musicians that he feels isn’t being taken advantage of fully. “I can now make music out of a banana, or David Cameron, or Belgium,” he says. “It’s such a profound revolution that if I’m going to make music about prices of bananas in Jamaica, or the banana wars in Latin America, then to use the sound of an apple would seem totally irrelevant. So regardless of if anyone ‘gets’ it, I feel a responsibility to use those sounds, otherwise you’re talking gibberish. If you’re assembling a language by which to communicate, you need to make sure the language has integrity and the words make sense.”

Of course, technology has given us the power to make anything sound like virtually anything else. Yet Herbert believes musicians have a responsibility to select their sounds properly.

“There’s no point making a banana sound like a guitar,” he argues. “You might as well use a guitar. Its important to make the sound readable. Unless the political point is to disguise or transform it.” He adds, with a hint of glee: “I’ve managed to sneak all sorts of noises into things – some big, international projects – that I couldn’t possibly talk about.”

This is the thing with Herbert and his musical projects. On first hearing of them, they might seem madcap, but after speaking to him about them it’s all the other musicians – with an entire soundworld at their disposal and electing to use only well-trodden sounds - who look crazy.

“It’s about taking responsibility for the things that I can, and music is one of those areas,” he says. “I guess that’s one reason why I feel compelled to go to these bizarre lengths.” He looks around his studio and appears crestfallen: “But, you know, I’m still using an Apple Mac built in awful conditions. The majority of the technology here was developed by the military. The vocoder was made so that Winston Churchill could disguise his voice during the war. So we’re all hypocrites.”

In an era of Donald Trump and the Daily Mail there’s something profoundly important about shutting up

Matthew Herbert

Herbert’s next project will be a record that dispenses with the compromises of record-making entirely. A book published by Unbound, it describes the record he would make if he had unlimited resources. “It could be the sound of 2,515 alarm clocks for Bangladeshi garment workers going off at the same time, or it could be the sound of Samantha Cameron rubbing sun cream on David Cameron’s back,” he enthuses. Ironically, he says that after years of struggling to convey ideas with music, he found the “greatest liberation in words, in describing instead of doing”.

Still, Herbert believes sound is an undervalued resource, able to travel around corners and through the darkness. He praises the way it can be more evocative than image (“If I played you the sound of the sea we would both imagine something different”) and requires us to be quiet to appreciate: “In an era of Donald Trump and the Daily Mail there’s something profoundly important about shutting up.”

Sound also allows you, at least in 2015, the freedom to document things that a video camera couldn’t. “When I did the food record [Plat Du Jour] I went into an intensive chicken farm to record, which you’d never get in with a camera. It really is somewhere between the wild west and a total utopia.”

I mention a track he made as Radio Boy, which sampled the sound of a Starbucks caramel latte being poured away. This seems devilishly subversive – he was manipulating a branded product for artistic purposes in a way he would never be able to do with their visual logo.

“I do think that in 100 years’ time, Starbucks will have patented the sound of their coffee,” he says. “Which is why I see this moment as a golden age of sound, where we’re free to do anything. And that’s why I feel a responsibility to push on, to make things difficult for myself and to go into those uncomfortable areas.”